Bank of the West Mobile Platform

Client Profile and ChallengeThe Bank of the West Mobile Group is known for pushing their organization forward. The guiding principles of experience design, set forth by the Multichannel Group, include a “mobile-first” concept that leads the way in interaction design. For the past two years, I worked with my client, Bank of the West, to manage their mobile program. In that time, we launched two iterations of the platform (v2.0 and v2.1) and in the fall of 2014 they launched the third (v3.0). The platforms include mobile web, iPhone, iPad and Android.

SolutionVersion 2.1 was our largest effort of these, as it included a ground-up redesign of the platform to the latest brand standards, set by the homepage redesign earlier that year. We were integrating more closely with the development vendor so that we took less of a “throw it over the fence” approach and more of a side-by-side design so that the developers could validate designs on the fly, provide feedback and offer alternate solutions where needed.

Also included in 2.1 for the first time was a round of usability testing, where the bank presented the test-ready code to users for feedback prior to launch. We organized and executed on-site testing which gave us two categories of information: immediate and long-term. The immediate feedback included small but very important improvements that were fed back into the current release. The long-term feedback was used to inform the road map of future releases including bigger impact user interactions, new features and improvements to existing features. The other big win for this new venture was to help the organization and mobile group understand the importance and value of usability testing.

ResultsThe Mobile group continues to lead the innovation standard at the bank and each new launch contains new features for their customers. Their goal is now to include testing in every launch, either early on to inform current design or towards the end of development to push future releases forward.